The beer

Brewmaster Matthew Schumacher and Crystal, his wife, were part of Goat Island Brewing’s fifth anniversary celebration on April 10. Appropriately, he says, it was the largest taproom crowd in the brewery’s history ... well, so far, anyway. People move to Cullman for many different reasons. Matthew Schumacher moved all the way from Seattle for the beer. More specifically, to become ...

The new brewmaster at Goat Island

Story and photos By David Moore

That first batch of homebrew 22-year-old Matthew Schumacher cooked up in January 1996 wasn’t made to celebrate the new year. Nor was it intended to launch a career as a brewmaster – an eventuality that earned him the distinction as probably the only person to ever move to Cullman because of the beer.

Nope. It was done simply to make and enjoy – he hoped – a good brew.

At the time, Matthew’s career path was teaching, so he studied secondary social science education at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. But he liked beer, and jumped into his new hobby with both feet, buying equipment and brewing and bottling a tricky five-gallon batch of Australian lager.

“You had to control the temperature a lot more than other beers require,” he says.

He still thinks it’s the best beer he ever drank.

“It was one of those eureka moments,” he laughs. “It tasted good to an extent it was shocking. It was fairly complicated, and I got it right the first time I did it. It was a unique experience.”

A roommate offered his own critique after a tentative sip.

“I haven’t gone blind yet,” he proclaimed.

Matthew returned to the homebrew store and bought ingredients for a stout he

called Mudslide, then a beer he dubbed 144 Banana Weed.

“144 is a gross,” he grins. “And it was really gross at first. But I aged it for six months and it became awesome.”

Matthew relocated his family from Seattle in April 2020 to become the new brewmaster at Cullman’s Goat Island Brewing – yep, he moved here for the beer. But that was hardly his first move.

He spent his early years in an Iowa farming community with a shrinking population of 900. Son of Ken and Chris Schumacher, he has an older sister, Erica, now a graphic artist and citizen of the United Kingdom; and a brother, Zach, who is an attorney in San Diego.

Matthew was 11 – already enjoying cooking and baking and thinking (at least at the time) about becoming a dentist – when his dad graduated from college. As a NASA contractor, he relocated the family to Satellite Beach, Florida.

In high school Matthew tasted his first beer, probably thanks to the guy his sister was dating.

“Why,” the neophyte wondered, “do they drink this stuff?”

Matthew figured out the answer long before he started homebrewing in Orlando. It was there that he also started cooking professionally.

So, when he moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1996, he cooked at several restaurants and brewpubs. Naturally, he lugged his growing array of homebrew equipment with him.

In the fall of 2000, Matthew didn’t move from Boulder but he did change directions again, gravitating toward the admissions office at the University of Colorado.

“Studying social science, studying people … that always interested me, and I got into anthropology,” he says. “My plan was to study the subbranch of anthropology for forensics. But “CSI” had just come out on TV, and suddenly everybody and their brother wanted to study what I had gone into.”

With forensics’ luster lost, he turned to biological anthropology and human evolution. Indiana Jones, Matthew says, was a huge influence. Plus …

“I had for a long time thought I might become a college professor. That’s kind of how my brain works, and this was just the first step.”

In 2002, Matthew got his degree in anthropology and entered a post-grad program at San Diego State University in cultural anthropology. Naturally, he lugged his growing array of homebrew equipment with him.

At far left, Matthew tests the gravity of a nearly completed beer. Like anything made with a recipe, brewing beer requires ingredients, which are obviously ordered in bulk. At center, Matthew takes stock of his stock. Above, Gigi, 4, and Emmerich, 6, clown around in Cullman’s Warehouse District for this photo Crystal shot. “It’s definitely better than I could ever have anticipated,” she says of their move in spring 2020.

He was but one of the Schumacherdominos falling at the time – his parents had already moved to San Diego. And his brother, who had followed him to Colorado, also moved to San Diego.

“My family tends to move around,” Matthew grins. “We scatter and then follow each other.”

At SDSU one summer, Matthew did some interesting field work, studying indigenous fishing people in the Solomon Islands. Okay, he didn’t haul his homebrew equipment with him, but he did discover Sol Brewery in the islands.

“The beer was all right,” he says, “kind of a Danish lager in disguise. They had to import all their ingredients.”

During his four years at SDSU, Matthew picked up a new girlfriend, and after graduation he followed her to Seattle where she worked on her PhD at the University of Washington.

Naturally, he lugged his still growing array of homebrew equipment with him. Plus, he took with him a new change in direction – well, sort of.

“I was interested at this point in becoming a professional brewer, and, especially at that time, it was the place to become a brewer,” Matthew says. “I had lived in several brewery hotspots.”

In 2006, few online or school programs existed for those seeking to become professional brewers. So Matthew, armed with pamphlets and handwritten notes – and what’s more, 10 years of homebrewing experience – applied for a job at Maritime Pacific Brewing Co.

Maritime hired Matthew as its cellarmaster.

“A lot of people start at the very bottom scrubbing kegs,” he says. “Because of my homebrewing and general knowledge, I did not do that. But I learned how to do everything there.”

The original brewery was in an old muffler shop, but in 2010 Maritime moved to a location comparable in physical size to Goat Island. It also opened a big taproom restaurant and hired new employees.

One of those was Crystal Huntsucker, who grew up in the small town of Deer Park north of Spokane and was hired to wait tables.

“That’s how we met,” Matthew says. “I will always owe that to Maritime, if nothing else.”

Obviously something other than West Coast beer was brewing there.

Crystal and Matthew held a surprise wedding in 2012 on a beach in Florida, where his parents had moved. “It was beautiful,” he says.

The year before, Matthew had been named brewmaster at Maritime.

“My first three years as brewmaster were our best three years,” he says, a head of professional pride rising to the rim of his figurative pint glass. “We flirted with 10,000 barrels, which was always my goal.”

His high-tide mark was 9,650 barrels – enough to top off more than 2.39 million pint glasses.

Maritime’s market, however, was changing. Initially one of two “neighborhood” breweries, Maritime would soon be surrounded by 15 craft producers. Legalization of marijuana further squeezed the Seattle market.

“Maritime had been there 30 years,” Matthew says. “Everybody knew it and loved it, but it wasn’t the fresh, new thing. There are a lot of hipsters in Seattle, and they only wanted what was new, regardless of how good the old, stable brewery was.”

Beyond a changing market, Matthew had developed an itch.

“I was looking for a change in jobs. I wanted to be at a place that could do more innovation, that could see the benefit of changes and not just fear them.

“All of this coincided with us starting a family,” he adds. “The prospect of raising kids in a giant city like Seattle was not appealing to us.”

Matthew and Crystal were selective as to where they might go.

“We were not just going to pull up and move willy-nilly. “Nothing is perfect,” he continues. “We had to find something as close to the perfect fit as we could – a job I could enjoy at a company on the right track. We also wanted to find a community where we could be comfortable raising our kids.”

The Northwest was a low priority. And mega breweries, like Sierra Nevada, were out. Matthew had about a dozen interviews from Montana to Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Finally, in March 2020, he read on Probrewer.com that Goat Island Brewing in a place called Cullman, Alabama was looking for a brewmaster. Quick internet sleuthing checked off all the boxes, so he submitted his resumé. Then he got smart.

“I want you to do some research,” he told Crystal, who had never lived outside of Washington. So she did – and tentatively liked what she found.

“I said we would go to visit because we were looking for the right place for the kids and for Matthew,” Crystal says.

It’s good she agreed. Almost immediately, Matthew was invited to interview with Goat Island owners Mike

Katie Reams, top, who has an MA in biology from Georgia Southern, chats with Matthew. From Statesboro, Ga., she stayed with area family to undergo an internship at Goat Island as part of the brewing science and operations program she’s in. New hire Kayla Owens, above, of Locust Fork, cleans kegs at the brewery. “I want to learn what they’re doing here,” says the former hostess at a brewpub in Trussville. Nick Gerowski of Warrior, blue shirt at left, and Garrett Smith of Cullman sometimes help with the brewing, underway at top left, but they can always count on “glorified janitorial work.” “If you have been in the food industry at all, you understand why it needs to be clean,” Garrett says. Nick says they take extreme precautions not to contaminate the delicate brewing process with bacteria.

Mullaney, Gery Teichmiller, John Dean and Brad Glenn.

When they read Matthew’s resumé, Mike says, they were immediately impressed that he was an experienced brewer from Seattle.

“Which is arguably the nation’s number one beer city,” Mike says. “His experience as a sous chef and an anthropology instructor at San Diego State caught our eye – somebody that can teach and knows flavors checks important boxes.”

After speaking to Matthew by phone, the Goat guys were even more impressed.

“He spoke with authority and knowledge about brewing and helping aspiring brewers to grow and improve,” Mike says. “When we hung up, we knew he was more than a head brewer. He was a leader. That is exactly what we needed.”

So Matthew and Crystal flew down in mid-March and underwent a several-day whirlwind education on Goat Island and Cullman.

Despite Covid restrictions being enacted during their visit – one day they returned to the brewery to find all of the tables had been hauled out of the taproom – the Northwesterners were greatly impressed.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people,” Crystal says of the owners. “They felt like family. It’s hard to believe they were new in our lives.”

Excellent schools, strong economy, fine parks and other community assets along with a large Catholic contingency … Crystal and Matthew found all were anomalies from the preconceived palette from which many people paint the South.

“And settled by Germans?” Matthew laughs. “In Florida, nobody could pronounce my last name.”

Their last night here, Mike presented Matthew an offer. A few days later he called to accept it.

So, 14 years after he become Maritime’s cellarmaster, Matthew, along with Crystal and their two children, said “see ya” to Seattle.

Naturally, he lugged his now quite huge array of little-used homebrew equipment with him. (Once fitting on a tabletop, all his brewing gear – including his initial, $12 glass carboy – now requires a storage unit.)

The move required two trucks, which they – foolishly, Matthew says – opted to drive themselves. Covid restrictions in Seattle had closed thrift stores, their wouldbe depositories for much of a big houseful of stuff. Covid-closed and capacity-limited lodgings forced two truck cab sleepovers on their five-day odyssey.

On the bright side, Cullman changed what had been nearly two hours of daily

A perk of the job, and serious responsibility, the brewmaster taps a fresh beer straight from the fermenter and gives it the ol’ taste test. “Ah,” says Matthew, lending his professional seal of approval to a new batch of Goat Island.

commuting for Matthew to a four-minute drive. Farewell, rat race.

“Cullman has been beyond expectations,” Crystal says. “The schools have been incredible with socialization for the kids. Our son’s kindergarten teacher, Caroline Tidmore, got him reading halfway through the year.”

Crystal’s also enjoyed working some at Goat Island, initially bartending weekends.

“The concerts there are really fun and the regular customers are fun and engaging,” she says. “Looking back, it was pretty wild, the jump we made. I think we are both still shocked we did it, but it’s been pretty awesome.”

In keeping with the aforementioned knack for Schumacher family members to follow each other around, Matthew’s dad is moving to Fairview.

Several months before Matthew’s arrival, Goat Island invested in a canning line to get its Blood Orange Berliner Weisse into stores. With the new blockbuster brew joining Richter Pils and Sipsey River Red as canned offerings, Goat Island greatly expanded its retail presence.

“There are a lot more convenience stores and groceries that can carry our product now as opposed to bars that will take our kegs of draft.

“Blood Orange is great, and we will ride that pony for as long as we can,” Matthew says. “The demand is still enormous, but nothing can last forever. We need to be ready for what’s next.”

Toward that end, Goat Island now also cans Hippieweizen and Giggling Goat IPA. The latter is a collaboration with the local Pink Boots chapter – which Matthew initiated – of the national group that promotes women’s roles in the brewing industry.

Since his arrival, Matthew has also initiated six new beers: Mango Weisse, Crane Hill Kolsch, Puget South IPA, Dinkleberg, the new Oktoberfest and an ESB (extra special bitter). Goat Island started canning the first two this summer.

So Matthew has his hands full. One thing he’s not particularly concerned about is an exploding bubble in the region’s growing number of craft breweries.

“The bubble has a leak in Seattle. I don’t think we are anywhere near that happening here, and I think we have better shot of lasting than a lot of other breweries.

“Goat Island had a really good foundation when I came in,” Matthew continues. “I was brought in to take it to another level. I would say we are already starting to do that. We are certainly sending more beer out of here than anyone thought possible.”

Cheers!

“Absolutely,” grins the guy who moved to Cullman for the beer. “We are moving in very positive direction.”

Goat Island co-owner Mike Mullaney says sales in 2020 were up 62 percent over 2019. They’re expected to grow another 40 percent this year and would be even higher except for lingering logistics issues, a hangover from the effects of the pandemic.